Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 IMAX: Hubble 3D
Lowest review score: 0 Divorce: The Musical
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. Skate Kitchen
    Skate Kitchen has plenty to say about the lengths to which young women must go to clear out a little breathing room in testosterone-heavy spaces, but it is first and foremost an irresistible hangout movie.
  2. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    The best part of “Miseducation” is the diverse group of adolescents sharing Cameron’s experience.
  3. Night Comes On
    Night Comes On is, true to its title, blanketed in a dim, crepuscular state of waiting. Fishback, her film career unfurling clearly before her from scene to scene, blazes a way out of it.
  4. Nico, 1988
    Dyrholm’s performance is a powerhouse of authenticity. Her moroseness is mesmerizing, but she also gives Nico a tense intelligence, and her singing is uncanny.
  5. Puzzle
    We should be grateful that it exists, if only because it affords a long-overdue leading role to Kelly Macdonald.
  6. Euthanizer
    The script’s more grotesque aspects integrate well enough into a portrait of everyday life among the least-reputable citizens of a grime-flavored community...while the film’s grungy aesthetic likewise keeps the bizarre story feeling at least somewhat grounded.
  7. The Third Murder
    Compelling enough while you’re watching it, frustrating then forgettable once it ends, this is a work that wouldn’t command much attention if it came from any other director. Coming from this one, it mostly intrigues as an unexpected if not terribly rewarding change of pace.
  8. Blindspotting
    In a stroke of combined wisdom and humility, rather than pretending to have the answers, Casal and Diggs are content to pose the questions, relying on their considerable wit and comedic charm to present such tricky topics in refreshingly engaging fashion.
  9. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade shines as, like, a totally spot-on, you know, portrait of Millennial angst and stuff. That may be how Kayla (and all her peers) talk...but Burnham shows a sociolinguist’s ear for the cadence and flow of 21st-century girl-speak, and Fisher...delivers his dialogue so naturally, you’d swear she’s making it up as she goes along.
  10. Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind
    Zenovich, the director of “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” offers just what you want from a documentary like this one: She brings us closer to events that have been covered many times, deepening — or overturning — what we think we know about them.
  11. Sorry to Bother You
    Paradoxically, the more ridiculous Riley’s gonzo social critique gets, the more boring it becomes, to the point that its out-of-control second half starts to feel like some kind of bad trip.
  12. Custody
    Legrand’s achievement — his integrity, one might say — is that he’s managed to cut to the marrow of the situation while remaining keenly sensitive to how such things play out in the real world.
  13. Leave No Trace
    There’s a listless, almost meandering nature to the story. The film’s conflict is clear — this is no way to raise a child, and allowed to continue in this fashion, Will risks both his life and Tom’s — and yet there’s no sense of where the script it headed, and no urgency to its resolution.
  14. Dark River
    Dark River isn’t quite as bracing or as unexpected as the director’s previous work.... Still, there’s scarcely room here for improvement at the level of craft or performance; in particular, it’s gratifying to see leading lady Ruth Wilson headlining a big-screen vehicle worthy of her flinty brilliance.
  15. Damsel
    Damsel is a comedy of attitude made with the indulgent touch of an art Western. That’s a refreshingly original thing, though it’s not as blow-you-away cool as the filmmakers seem to think it is.
  16. The Catcher Was a Spy
    There’s a curious lack of credibility and urgency in this big-screen adaptation, the kind of respectable near-miss that can happen when worthy talent apply themselves to a project they’re just not ideally suited for.
  17. A Skin So Soft
    Côté assures them a humanity as well, without trying to analyze their obsession with this extravagant concept of masculinity, nor the need for self-display.
  18. Hereditary
    Ari Aster directs slowly, meditatively, purging the film of any of the usual horror-video razzmatazz. Instead, he creates scary coherent spaces for the audience to sink into.
  19. Hearts Beat Loud
    Clemons has been a luminous presence who could bloom into a great grown-up actress. Hearts Beat Loud proves she’s the real deal. As for the film around her, Haley’s 21-drum solo salute to the passage of time is, like Frank, merely fine. But he admirably keeps his characters’ victories small and their losses familiar, making his movie a ballad everyone can hum to.
  20. Nancy
    Instead of exploring her actions, and the people they affect, Nancy‘s restraint keeps the film closed-off and grim, as muddy gray as the life she’s aching to ditch.
  21. American Animals
    This is unabashedly virtuoso, show-off filmmaking, as cocky as the misguided young men at the film’s center, who, at least for a period, saw their lives as a Hollywood romp in itself.
  22. The Tale
    Both a natural extension of Fox’s career to date and a complete about-face, The Tale marks her first narrative feature, but only because traditional documentary wouldn’t do justice to this messy, meandering investigation into her traumatic first sexual experience, for the incidents it depicts are true, “at least as far I know.”
  23. Mary Shelley
    Impressively shot and suffused with a righteous feminist fire, the film is undercut by a confused and clunky script and a fundamental lack of thematic focus, turning an extraordinary story into didactic and disjointed melodrama.
  24. First Reformed
    In First Reformed, Paul Schrader courts respectability and leaves it in the dust, getting stoned on excess. But make no mistake: He’s still one hell of a filmmaker.
  25. On Chesil Beach
    It’s a lyrical and rapturous film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking.
  26. Angels Wear White
    Engaging female dynamics result in strong, convincing performances, especially as their relations eschew platitudes on sisterhood or exploitative images of victimization.
  27. Mrs. Hyde
    Half enjoyable, half frustrating.
  28. Disobedience
    None of these three characters are tidy, but neither is desire, nor faith, nor love, and Lelio resists every opportunity to make them so.
  29. Borg vs. McEnroe
    When the big tennis finale arrives, Metz finds all sorts of ways to make the match interesting, blending urgent music, creative camera vantages and ridiculously hyperbolic announcer commentary to generate the desired tension. But the real reason we’re invested is far simpler than that: Metz and his cast have made us care about both Borg and McEnroe by this point.
  30. Zama
    The frustrating nine-year wait for new material from Martel has done nothing to blunt her exquisite, inventive command of sound and image, nor her knack for subtly violent exposure of social and racial prejudice on the upper rungs of the class ladder.
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